Combat Tips

Defiance is a third-person shooter. Most of the substance of the game is combat. We’ve assembled some helpful information to aid new players who are coming to grips with the unique scale and nuance of battles in Defiance. We encourage you to scour the tips below, and to add your own experience and strategic wisdom to the growing knowledge base.

The shooting mechanics of Defiance are fairly straightforward, standard third person shooter fare. But there are a few tips below that may help you as you take your first steps into using the extensive arsenal of Defiance firearms.

Each Weapon type is designed with certain range-tiers in mind. Weapons are effective within their intended range but tend to become grossly underpowered when employed outside these parameters. Shotguns are point blank weapons, mostly useless at over a few feet. SMGs are designed to apply a lot of damage to a single point-blank foe. BMGs and Infectors are both mostly useful at close range.

Assault Rifles and LMGs are medium range specialty arms, though Assault rifles maintain some usefulness at long range when fired in controlled bursts, and both assault Rifles and LMGs can be useful at short range with careful aiming. Sniper Rifles excel at ranged attacks but lose effectiveness at even medium distances.

Detonators and Rockets are useful at most ranges if used properly, but their slow reload time can make them a liability in close-range swarm combat.

Most weapons lose accuracy on their full automatic settings, but careful players can mitigate this somewhat by employing two methods. First, rapidly tapping the attack button rather than holding down the attack button tends to reset weapon accuracy in all firearms except the LMG. Second, using the controller to lower the barrel during the later stages of a burst can compensate considerably for runaway. This is especially true with SMGs.

Until your Skills improve through experience, don’t even bother with hipshots. Even with Shotguns, the damage drop-off from lost accuracy isn’t worth the speed trade-off.

If your favored Weapon allows it, apply stabilizing or damage-increasing Modifications as soon as possible. Early in the game, travel to the Supply Depot at Iron Demon Ranch and pick up any Modifications available for your favored firearm. Even the small bonuses added by level one modifications can help your deal more accurate and effective damage. Use the Salvage Matrix to apply Mods.

Finally, grind. Using a particular type of Weapon improves your character’s inherent Skill with that weapon. Pick a favored Weapon type early on and stick with it for a while, leveling up your damage, accuracy, and reload time with that class of firearm.

Getting out of the way in Defiance can be downright frustrating. There is no obvious cover mechanic, and characters lack the speed to utilize twitch-shooter evasion. Effective dodging is difficult. Crouching does little to protect you from being targeted, and your character is relatively slow even while running, making the avoidance of explosive projectiles and Grenades difficult.

There are, however, some techniques you can use to increase your survival.

Remember what we learned from Captain Kirk: if you don’t want to get shot...roll!

Your strongest reactionary defense against sudden attack is your character’s rolling ability, activated on PC by the ALT key. Rolling throws your character several meters to the front or side of their current position. The maneuver is usually the best way to escape Grenades alerts and can often move the character to the periphery of explosive blasts. Rolling also tends to minimize character exposure to fields of automatic weapons fire. Rolling rarely allows the player to evade all damage from an attack, but often reduces it.

If you are charged up with the BlurEGO Power, you move fast enough to either close with enemies or move to high cover with sufficient speed to avoid most enemy tracking. Cloaked player characters are almost never targeted so long as the Cloak lasts and they refrain from attacking. Decoy holograms draw most attention away from the character.

Anything taller and wider than your character blocks bullets, and the designers of Defiance left a lot of debris laying around for just that purpose. A lot of combat in defiance involves finding something tall, stepping out from behind it, shooting an enemy, ducking back, reloading/recharging Shields, and repeating. It isn’t elegant, but it usually works.

Perhaps the most effective way to avoid being targeted in Defiance is to give the enemy more things to shoot at than he can handle. Groups of PCs working together intelligently can overwhelm most enemy mobs fairly quickly. So long as the players maintain a relative distance from one another wide enough to protect from high explosives, a group of PCs usually confounds the AI enough to minimize danger to any single character. This is especially true when multiple [{Decoys]] are deployed.

The most common way to use Blur is to close with enemies quickly. Characters specializing in Blur powers benefit greatly from specializing in short-range firearms, especially shotguns and SMGs. Blur reduces the time your character is vulnerable to enemy fire while making an approach, a valuable asset in a game where evading enemy attacks is nebulously defined.

The second use of Blur is running away. When your Shields are collapsing and you find yourself unexpectedly surrounded, Blur is the difference to making the sprint behind high cover or dying with a spread of buckshot in your back.

Finally, it’s easy to forget that one of Blur’s bonuses is significantly-increased melee damage. Blur isn’t just a motion power. When you’re toe-to-toe with a tough enemy and your Weapon runs dry, activating Blur and then unleashing a barrage of melee attacks is often more effective than pausing to reload.

Cloak is very useful for long-range attacks. Snipers who activate Cloak immediately before their first shot will often find that the enemy has a hard time acquiring and re-acquiring them through the invisibility shield.

Cloak is also useful in group combat, especially Arkfalls. With a number of targets to choose from, the enemy AI tends to lose track of cloaked attackers fairly quickly.

Up close and hunting alone, Cloak will get you one, or maybe two good hits from behind before the enemy locks onto you. It can be useful for getting the jump on single foes with a critical strike, but against close-range groups you are better served by Decoy.

Decoy is an extremely potent power. The enemy AI is positively stupid toward Decoys, locking onto the hologram almost immediately. Players being gunned down to the edge of death can often gain a valuable breathing space by releasing a Decoy, drawing every instance of enemy fire away from themselves. So long as the character releases the Decoy in an unobstructed line at least a few yards from the player, even explosive-wielding foes can usually be rendered harmless for a few precious seconds. This tactic works especially well when trying to escape a swarm of enemies.

Decoy can also be used to create openings in Defenses. Running a Decoy right down the middle of an enemy emplacement causes most foes to turn and fire at the illusion, granting the player time to pick off a couple of foes before the rest become aware of her presence. LMGs and Assault Rifles tend to mesh especially well with this approach.

Decoy also has it purpose in the pvp environment and even still further in pve with its second activate. Upon deploying decoy during its duration you can hit your ego power key again and move to the location of the decoy, this can not only be used to draw fire from the AI and get a few moments to heal but sent in the right direction it can help as a distance jump toward your (sometimes necessary) retreat. However its PVP component is much stronger as you can send it out as a scout to draw fire, and after a moment the player will realize what has happened, timed right thats the perfect jump to the decoy to add some surprise damage and possibly net yourself a kill.

I will give this word of warning though, unless its been fixed in game I cannot yet confirm, take care using Decoy in buildings particularly anything above ground floor, I've amusingly locked myself within non accessible structures more than once.

Overcharge is the least strategic EGO power. Dealing greater damage is always of advantage to the player, so Overcharge enjoys the virtue of being constantly useful. Using Overcharge is mostly about conservation: save it until you need it, either when facing a mob of low-powered foes or a single more-powerful enemy. It’’s a no-brainer to make sure your Overcharge is ready when approaching the end of a dungeon or when stepping into a large enemy emplacement.